Books have illustrations. Not just children's books — think of a good travel story, or the way The New Yorker pairs short stories with a single precise spot illustration.
How the pipeline works
- A player types a sentence and submits.
- The AI translates that sentence into a short, vivid English description — pulling out only the most drawable element.
- That description goes together with the chosen style anchor to the image generator.
- The resulting image appears next to the sentence in the reveal phase.
Ten styles, one choice
The creator picks one style for the entire book: pixel art, watercolour, Ghibli, fairy tale, children's book, noir, engraving, pop art, sketch, or cyberpunk.
What we learned
Early experiments showed: it works best when you stick to one style per game. Mixing feels messy — as if someone swapped pens halfway through the drawing. Second lesson: text in images is a curse. AI models love putting names or words in a picture, and it almost always looks badly scrawled. We've now appended a long list of "NO TEXT" instructions to every prompt to prevent that.
What an illustration actually gives you
A pure text game works fine. But in a visual game something different happens in the reveal phase: players don't just want to read the sentences, they want to see the picture. Someone says halfway through "wait, scroll back, I want to see that little dragon again." The pictures become part of the memory of the evening.
A side effect: players write more visually. When you know the AI will try to draw every sentence, you're more likely to write about concrete things ("a purple mushroom with eyes") rather than abstractions ("he felt abandoned"). That's exactly what Storytale's comedy tone also wants — concreteness over abstraction.
Which style for which occasion?
A few personal favourites from test games:
- Pixel art — works fantastically for stories about RPG-style adventures, dragon hunts, or when your audience appreciates the retro-game vibe.
- Children's book — universally charming. Default for family games.
- Watercolour — for atmospheric stories, romance, dreamy scenes. Benefits from longer, more detailed sentences.
- Noir — dark and dramatic. Good for detective stories or when someone confesses something.
- Cyberpunk — futuristic, neon. For tech friends and sci-fi fans.
We also have Ghibli, fairy tale, engraving, pop art, and sketch. Ten styles sounds like a lot — in practice you have 2–3 favourites and use the rest occasionally.
Cost
A Visual game costs us roughly three cents — the illustrations are by far the biggest share (~$0.025), and the text AI is a fraction of that. Up to a few hundred games per day that's manageable. With growth it becomes a trade-off — see the blog post on costs.
For now, Visual is behind a beta password. Not to gatekeep — just to avoid an unexpected popularity spike draining the image budget overnight.